


all along the watchtower

by jugheadjones



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Gen, the archies origin story, whatever goes wrong in season 2 this is how it all happened im telling you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-13
Updated: 2017-09-13
Packaged: 2018-12-27 16:00:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12084399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jugheadjones/pseuds/jugheadjones
Summary: A few weeks after Betty’s speech at the Jubilee, someone spray-paints FRED ANDREWS IS RIVERDALE in eight-foot tall letters on the side of city hall.or,Things go wrong and small towns are shitty and sometimes that's okay.





	all along the watchtower

**Author's Note:**

> fbi agent, holding a gun to my face: do it. write a fanfic without mentioning that fred andrews used to coach riverdale little league  
> me: *spits in their face* fuck you

A few weeks after Betty’s speech at the Jubilee, someone spray-paints **FRED ANDREWS IS RIVERDALE** in eight-foot tall letters on the side of city hall.

The act creates quite a public stir. Most of the citizens of Riverdale interpret it as a tool of accountability, a reminder that they had all pledged on the night of the jubilee to be better, to never allow another Jason. Others see it as pure, simple anarchy - a total rejection of the mayoral system that has served the town well for years and a desire for chaos and misspent tax dollars on paint. Others yet suggest that maybe someone just did it to cheer Fred up, though anyone who’d had a conversation longer than five minutes with him in the last few years would know he despises public attention.

From his hospital bed, Fred Andrews makes a statement that he does not condone the defacing of public property, nor does he want it to continue. Also, please don’t ask him about this anymore. He’s sure no one will do it again.

The water tower is next, leading citizens to speculate how the culprit pulled that one off - it was a hell of a climb from ground level. Then it’s the wooden boards holding together the Register’s front window. Copycats take chalk to the streets outside the high school, identifiable as imitators by the school-house printed A’s, while the real vandal had written them with an extra curve. To get to Riverdale High School in the morning, you have to walk over no less than fourteen variations of FRED ANDREWS IS RIVERDALE from the minute you leave your front door.

On the topic of RHS, Team Captain Reggie Mantle reportedly calls his Bulldogs (sans Archie) in for a huddle before the championship game and declares that they're playing this one for Fred. The group of boys aged fifteen to eighteen pretty much all owe Fred Andrews one - for everything from late-night pickups from parties they're too young to drink at to rehearsals of the coming-out speech they're one day going to give their own parents. That night they play like never before and Moose Mason leads them to an untouchable victory. The team storms Fred’s hospital room later and presents him with a muddy game-day ball. Fred couldn't be happier.

Sheriff Keller, at the urging of local do-gooders, takes handwriting samples from a handful of Riverdale High students. None match, but Reggie Mantle’s - with the d’Nealian A’s - is the closest. Reggie says he didn't do it, but he would in a goddamn heartbeat. Not only was Fred a hell of a guy, but he was the best little league coach this town ever had.

Betty writes an op-ed for the Register about it, and it's the most successful issue since one of the Blossom Sugar Farm floats caught fire at the Thanksgiving Day parade in 1986. Later, she’ll use it in her portfolio when she applies to specialized creative writing programs post-secondary. Fred gets a copy of the article mailed to him from the Riverdale corrections facility: FP’s circled the image of the water tower, and written in along the margin in pencil are the words _SAVE FERRIS?_

Fred smiles at that. His Ferris Bueller moment. At long last.

For awhile there's a brief manhunt for a specific brand of spray paint, but the denizens of Riverdale give up when they realize the town hardware store only sells the one brand.

Sierra McCoy briefly resists the public re-configuring of their harmful small-town ideologies being championed under the name of one of their white, middle-age citizens - Josie and the Pussycats were Riverdale, too, and no one seemed to remember that - but there's no stopping the freight train once it's in motion. Taking a bullet for your only son is a more compelling story than dealing with a lifetime of microaggressions, and there's no changing that: it's still Riverdale, after all. She doesn't really know what she expected. But on the other hand, it was a whole goddamn bullet, and if Fred wants his name spray-painted in eight foot high letters on their local landmarks, she's not going to tell him he doesn't deserve it.

He doesn't want it, by the way. The paper keeps quoting him on that, because the ongoing investigation into the graffiti is being met with public resistance. Everyone thinks Keller’s being kind of an asshole for keeping it up, but the sheriff maintains he's under a lot of pressure from various neighbourhood watch groups.

No one believes him, because Alice Cooper’s busy relentlessly taking up a collection to help with Fred’s hospital bills. Donations triple in the days after the appearance of the city hall graffiti. After the water tower incident, they triple again. Fred crosses his fingers and prays, because he doesn't have any money left.

Kevin thinks it deserves to go viral, thinks if they spin the human interest angle they can get ten million clicks a day, at least half that in donations. Fred says internet fame is the worst kind of fame for anyone except musically talented cats, and that the Register article is more than enough publicity. He also says whoever did it should really go clean that off before the sub-zero temperatures make it impossible.

 **LOCAL HERO FRED ANDREWS SAYS TO STOP SPRAY-PAINTING HIS NAME ON SHIT** , reads the headline of the Blue & Gold’s humour column. Fred likes it so much he keeps two copies.

Other readers like it too, so the editors decide to work more humour into the paper. Chuck Clayton, facing a failing English grade and re-expulsion from all team sports (in the absence of a spot on the football team, he’s gotten pretty good at lacrosse) offers up an editorial cartoon for class credit. It hits like a forest fire.

Nancy Woods, in the same art class, makes **FRED ANDREWS IS RIVERDALE** buttons and hands them out to students. After awhile, they're on every bookbag in the county. 

Veronica gets it silk-screened onto a T-shirt and gives Archie one for free. Fred says he wants a matching one with Archie’s name, and Archie says fine, and Fred says if he's so okay with that then why wouldn't he let Fred buy them matching father-son T-shirts at the state fair in the spring of 2012.

Archie’s been playing the guitar nonstop with his broken hand newly-healing, especially for Fred, who has nothing to do in his hospital room. Jughead joins in on a makeshift drumset made out of plates and glasses from the hospital cafeteria. They start out as a dad rock cover band, and Veronica says she has a keyboard if they need someone to cover the piano parts. Betty wants in, but can't play the piano, so Veronica asks how she feels about the tambourine.

Someone - Fred’s highly convinced it’s Alice trying to make his life hell - comes out with **FRED ANDREWS IS RIVERDALE** bumper stickers. Fortunately, the citizens of Riverdale have their bumpers so crowded with **MY KID IS AN HONOUR STUDENT AT RIVERDALE HIGH** that almost no one picks one up.

“I just want to get a baseball diamond named after me,” complains Fred once while he's high on morphine, and they do it, because he’s still the town hero for awhile. There’s a renaming and a ribbon cutting ceremony. Fred complains heartily about the town’s willingness to expend tax dollars on his painkiller-induced ramblings until Archie promises that no matter where they're living in fifteen years, he’ll bring his grandkids home to see it.

Everyone at Southside High wants to know what the story is. Why the water tower says that, and what it has to do with the murders in town. Jughead tells them to wait, because there's a great book coming out on the topic. As soon as he can figure out how to clean up the foreshadowing.

A bit before the baseball diamond’s renamed, there’s another Jubilee-like fundraiser, because such events remain the only way Riverdale knows how to deal with it’s skeletons. “This one’s for my dad!” yells Archie when the newly coordinated group of Betty, Veronica, Archie and Jughead take the stage, and the house goes nuts for them both.

They play the clunkiest, most heartfelt, tambourine-punctuated version of _Hungry Heart_ their little Ed-Sheeran loving hearts can drum up and Fred walks forward into the middle of the floor like a man dreaming and stands beaming at Archie like he’s the only thing in the room. There are hot tears running down his cheeks: mostly because he loves him, partly because he’s touched, but also because this is a great song and they’re really butchering it.

For any or all of these reasons, there’s not a dry eye in the house.

Fame is fickle in small towns, however, as many a Miss Riverdale U.S.A has learned. (Fred’s sister Debbie was once among them, having taken the title in 1979 and then, crown in hand, scolded the room for fifteen minutes about the sexism inherent in adolescent beauty pageants, or indeed any beauty pageant at all. She had been front page news for a week, and then she’d been re-accepted into the town like she’d never left it.) It takes longer - probably because wherever you look up in the town you can see his name on the water tower - but it comes, and Fred embraces the same gradual slippage of fame with open arms. Despite Kevin’s best efforts, the memory of his sacrifice starts fading, and with it, the obsession with his heroism. And yet **FRED ANDREWS IS RIVERDALE** remains in black on their two local landmarks, ultimately a greater version of the Neighbourhood Watch sign installed on all their shady two-lane avenues.

Dilton will mention it at Pop’s, (which is still open and running, in a new, bloodless location on their once-bustling Main Street) suggest that the water tower graffiti could potentially be responsible for the lower overall rates of crime in the year after the shooting - that perhaps the reminder of what had once been was coaxing Riverdale to do better after all. Truthfully, though, he argues, crime rates always dip after catastrophe - and the only evidence that the sign has ever prevented any real wrongdoing comes when Archie and Jughead break a neighbour’s window while playing catch. Archie claims it impossible to do anything but fess up to the damage with his father’s name towering over him like God.

It’s printed at the back of Jughead’s first published novel like an easter egg - two pages after the epilogue. When the novel is re-printed for a twenty-fifth anniversary anthology of his works, the hidden epigraph is preserved.

Mary Andrews exchanges addresses with Cheryl Blossom when she comes to visit her husband and son the week after the shooting at Pop’s. They correspond for awhile, and Mary tells her there's always a room open at her place if she ever tires of her foster family, or if she’s ever wanted to see Chicago. Cheryl says she’ll think about it. The family who’s taken her in has this really cute girl named Sabrina, and it would be a shame if it didn't go anywhere.

The day the writing finally gets scrubbed off the side of City Hall, a Jennifer Gibson is arrested while going under a false name in a little town just outside of the state line. She's wanted in conjunction for the first-degree murder of her husband and suspicions of car theft and the luring of minors.

They put her away for life a week after FP Jones gets out. He spends his first night as a free man in Fred Andrews’ hospital room, sleeping chest to chest with his high school boyfriend, one hand curled protectively around his wrist.

In a lot of ways everything's changed, and in a lot of ways nothing’s changed. It takes a year and a half for the Register window to get fixed and the syrup-bottling factory still belches sweet-smelling smoke over the polluted depths of Sweetwater River. There's still bullying in the schools and the pothole on Main Street stays unfilled. To Fred’s relief the buttons with his name on them gradually break off bags and go missing, and the campaign to have their news story go worldwide never takes off.

The last time the slogan crops up is it’s written in the dust inside his baseball diamond with a stick, but the rain takes care of that a day and a half later. When the Archies (soon to be re-branded to the Reggies, gripes their newest member, but this name is an okay placeholder) leaves for their first out-of-town gig, they have a vintage black-and-white **FRED ANDREWS IS RIVERDALE** bumper sticker on the back of their van, a relic of their hometown history, a peeling slice of memorabilia that no one outside of their origins will ever understand. Fred stands in his driveway and waves them goodbye, calls _Good Luck!_ And _Be Safe!_ after them until they can't hear him anymore, and then a bit longer just in case. Vegas runs after the car for a block and then circles back, looking lost. Fred pretends not to cry over dinner, and FP reminds him that they'll be gone less than twenty four hours.

Hiram Lodge pays for the repainting of the water tower a while after Town Hall is fixed up, but the job they get done is pretty slapdash, and you can still read the writing through it. Some people think that’s on purpose, but no one can say for sure. 

As captain of the neighbourhood watch, Alice Cooper says the matter of vandalism needs to be taken extremely seriously. However, given the amount of pressure the town’s been under, the traumatized youth responsible should probably be pardoned this once. Keller gives up and inquiries into the matter cease entirely. 

Fred laughs. He's been copying Alice’s homework since the fourth grade. He knows exactly how she does her A’s.

Four months after the Register quotes her on the seriousness of the crime, Alice Cooper dumps the last empty can of black spray-paint from her garage and smiles.

And in the year 2032, Fred Andrews teaches his red-haired granddaughter how to swing in the baseball diamond they named after him in 2018.

**Author's Note:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> the next chapter of father-daughter dance is really dark so i wrote this to cheer myself up


End file.
